There are no impenetrable walls in a palace. When it came to the procurement matter, Cheng Baoyi had put on a show in front of everyone, kicking the ball right back to Baoxin’s court. Everyone was watching.
The eldest sister had a lukewarm relationship with her younger siblings. She was already ten years old when Cheng Kewei was born, making for a significant age gap between them. Of this generation, she was the only one who still retained some impression of Macau before the handover. Now, when she looked back on her childhood, it felt as distant as the era before the handover. In people’s eyes, that period was turbulent, chaotic, and carried a somewhat untamed air. There were arsons in the streets, public security was poor, and Cheng Yongtang’s storefronts were repeatedly harassed. The eerie stories of the 883 Restaurant that she heard from adults in her early childhood still cast a shadow she hadn’t shaken off.
Yet, no matter what, during that decade she had been the sole pearl of the Cheng family. Later on, with the birth of Cheng Kewei, the twins, and in that same year, Baoyi from the second branch, everything changed.
She particularly disliked Cheng Baoxin. A cute doll-like girl, she had been exceptionally good at talking and ingratiating herself with Grandma since childhood, practically acting as the apple of the old lady’s eye. It wasn’t until Kejia was born years later that Baoxin’s spotlight was slightly stolen. But Kejia had a gloomy personality; how could she ever compare to Cheng Baoxin’s flamboyant, larger-than-life nature, determined to snatch everyone’s affection for herself? Even when female classmates chased Cheng Keqi, Baoxin had to insert herself into it, clinging to her brother right in front of the other person and acting spoiled in his arms. How could any normal girl dare approach him?
Dislike aside, these were extraordinary times, and she prepared to have a talk with Baoxin.
Her brother-in-law strongly objected. “What if she doesn’t know? Isn’t that handing the leverage right into her hands?”
The eldest sister sat on the edge of the bed and hurled her hairbrush fiercely onto the bed.
“You realize this is handing me leverage?”
Her brother-in-law hurriedly stepped forward, wrapped his arms around her shoulders from behind, coaxed her in a succession of soft whispers, and kissed her face. The eldest sister let him hold her, neither moving nor pushing him away. She was long past the age of a young girl; she wasn’t someone who could be turned around by a man’s sweet talk. She asked coldly, “All this money you’ve been making—where has it gone?”
Her brother-in-law froze, lowered his head, and said, “I went into margin trading and lost quite a bit…”
The eldest sister smacked his shoulder hard, cried, and scolded him again. In the end, it inevitably culminated in her husband pulling her tight to make amends, offering apologies and kisses. As the eldest sister sobbed in his arms, she thought to herself: if it were just margin trading, that would be one thing. But if he had been gambling or keeping a woman on the side, she would never forgive him.
When the lights were turned out at night, her brother-in-law tried exceptionally hard. Realizing he was motivated by a sense of compensation, the eldest sister suddenly felt a wave of desolation. After it was over, she slept with her back to him, unable to fall asleep for a long time. After a long while, her brother-in-law suddenly flipped over, called out to her in a low voice, “A-Yun.”
The eldest sister gave a perfunctory response.
“There’s something I’ve had on my mind for a long time. I’m afraid if I don’t say it today, then later…”
The eldest sister’s heart skipped a beat. Was he going to confess? How old was the other woman? Was she pretty? How pathetic, she thought, as her tears actually began to roll down. She had been a beauty in her youth, and now she was only in her thirties—if she were a female celebrity, it would be her absolute prime.
Her husband pressed closer, burying his face in the crook of her neck. “Don’t you feel like your younger sister doesn’t look like you guys at all?”
Just that? The eldest sister’s heart relaxed, and she rolled over, losing her sleepiness. “What are you talking about? How doesn’t she look like us?” Was he about to say something like the sister-in-law wasn’t as pretty as his wife? She almost laughed out loud.
“You, Kewei, Keqi, including Grandma and the two from the second branch—you all have straight hair. But Baoxin’s hair has a bit of natural wave to it. It’s not permed.”
The eldest sister thought, Why are you paying so much attention to my sister? She grew a bit displeased. “Her hair is straight.”
“That’s because she styles it specially. Haven’t you noticed? Whenever the family goes out on vacation, she never goes into the water, never letting anyone see what her hair looks like when it’s wet.”
The eldest sister was a bit sleepy and tired. “What are you trying to say?” The moment she asked, she slowly began to realize what her husband meant. She felt shocked, yet thought it absurd. Baoxin and Keqi were twins, brought home together; there was no possibility of their mother having an affair.
She said, “There’s also the possibility of skipped-generation inheritance…”
In this household, to a certain extent, Huang Jiahao and good old A-Hao weren’t all that different. He too had to read the room. He too had to listen for the underlying meaning in people’s words. Hearing his wife speak this way, he knew he shouldn’t push the subject further, so he said softly, “Maybe. I was just chatting with you.”
He draped his arm over the eldest sister and slowly drifted off to sleep. But the eldest sister couldn’t sleep. She remembered that when they were young, Daddy often worked on the mainland. At that time, Keqi and Baoxin were only a few months old, and Mommy had taken the younger siblings along with her. They only returned to Macau to live permanently a year or two later. Could something have happened in between? So much time had passed that she had forgotten many things, remembering only that once when she went to the mainland to visit them, Mommy’s mood had been extremely low and she was often absent-minded. Ever since returning from the mainland, Mommy’s temperament had undergone a drastic change, remaining depressed and gloomy.
In the dead of night, nothing is more terrifying than letting your imagination run wild. She formed some truly horrifying guesses. This speculation was like a very long, venomous snake, its tail pointing toward a single question: What if Cheng Baoxin truly wasn’t a member of the Cheng family? The body of the snake coiled tightly around the eldest sister’s heart. Tossing and turning without sleep, she reached out for her phone and began searching for how to check blood relations.
A pot of Phalaenopsis orchids sat in the old lady’s room, kept in immaculate condition right beside the high-backed chair where she usually sat. Sunlight and moonlight streamed in through the window, falling upon the orchids. A-Hao meticulously sprayed them with water and carefully wiped down the pot every single day, and today was no exception. She knew these orchids had a bit of a temper: they needed watering every few days, and no water could be allowed to pool along the rim of the pot. Their temperament was much easier to figure out than the old lady’s. The old lady practically had no temper—or if she did, she pushed it down silently, always wearing a smiling expression, which made her all the more inscrutable.
Pinned beneath the pot of Phalaenopsis was a document. Finding it strange, A-Hao supported the base of the pot with one hand while gently pulling the paper out with the other, neatly placing it on the old lady’s bedside table. Before turning away, she glanced at it. Just a single glance made the hairs on her body stand on end, and she involuntarily backed away a few steps.
Things like this, she thought, only happened in cheesy television dramas. How could they happen right under her nose? Her mind raced. Should she put it back in its place? Pretend she never saw it? Or should she just leave first and let Emily come in? That silly girl doesn’t understand Chinese; she’d stupidly hand the stuff over to the old lady, and then I could pretend I never saw a thing. Excellent, that’s settled.
She picked up the document and was about to turn around to put it back when the old lady walked in, looking at her with a beaming smile. “What are you holding in your hand?”
Startled, A-Hao let the document slip, and it fell to the floor. Every day, the old lady took Cheng Yongtang’s Liver Protection Pills and Ningxin Tong, along with a constant rotation of herbal soups. With plenty of vital energy and unobstructed meridians, though her body aged, her eyes certainly did not. She looked closely—it was a blood relation appraisal report.
The tested person was Cheng Baoxin. However, the section for the person who submitted the samples had been redacted.
A-Hao shrank back behind the Phalaenopsis, shrinking further and further, wishing she could shrink down to the size of a flowerpot. She watched as the old lady looked at the document, remaining silent for a long time. Knowing when to quit, A-Hao slipped out of the room without a sound, pulling the bedroom door shut behind her.
Attached beneath the blood relation report was another document—an investigation report from a private detective agency in Hong Kong, stamped with an official seal to indicate legal validity. It detailed how the old lady’s eldest son, Cheng Jiye…
Jiye had always been fiercely ambitious, wanting to set up a factory on the mainland. Reluctant to let go of such a golden opportunity, he insisted on heading north, and his wife, Shuzhen, took the four-month-old twins along with her, leaving only Baowen and Kewei behind in Macau.
In the small mainland city at the turn of the millennium, living conditions fell short of Macau’s. Shuzhen was a full-time housewife; back in Macau, she had domestic helpers and a driver, living a life of ease. Once on the mainland, everything was simplified. They hired a local auntie to help out, but evenings and weekends relied entirely on themselves.
The day the incident occurred happened to be a weekend, and the auntie didn’t come. Shuzhen had agreed with Jiye that since Keqi had been coughing for the past few days, she would take him to the municipal maternal and child health hospital early in the morning, leaving Jiye to watch Baoxin for half a day at home. Jiye agreed. Who would have expected that day, a call would come from the mainland factory saying that the date for the formal audit had been finalized, and regulatory authorities would arrive at the factory for an on-site inspection the coming Monday, while several rectification items left over from the previous pre-inspection still hadn’t been sorted out. If they failed this hurdle, the new factory couldn’t open, and all the effort and money poured into it that year would go down the drain.
Jiye called Shuzhen repeatedly, but no one answered.
Baoxin was sleeping soundly in her crib. He figured the factory was close by—half an hour round trip, easily back within two hours. Shuzhen should be back around then too.
He sent his wife a text message, pulled up the crib rails, turned on the air conditioning, closed the bedroom door, and drove to the factory.